Steam, Dredges and Tractors: The Mining Machines Left in Yukon-Charley Rivers

Visitors to Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve can explore mining camps that look as if the miners simply dropped their tools, turned off their machines and walked away. A National Park Service article says these sites are open-air museums in a landscape sculpted by decades of mining, and that each machine, though at first it seems a mute hunk of rusted steel, has a story to tell.

Gold was never easy

The Klondike gold rush of the late 1890s and later discoveries across Alaska made the region synonymous with glittering gold and overnight wealth, but pulling profit from the earth was never easy. The region offered frigid temperatures, rough terrain and long supply lines, and the machines of the Industrial Revolution were slow to arrive in the Far North. For much of the gold rush, sled dogs and foot travel were more common than steamboats. Mechanization sped up only once gold was found in large quantities.

Klondike mining began with stampeders doing pick-and-shovel placer mining. They used whatever tools they could haul on their backs or build on site, and with hand tools, flowing water and sluice boxes they separated small amounts of gold from large amounts of sand and gravel. A prospecting pan could catch some gold at the surface, but most lay deep underground in a thin layer just above bedrock. Unlike stampeders in California half a century earlier, northern miners faced permafrost, which made digging to bedrock and finding the gold difficult, dangerous and slow. Within a year or two, miners with money began importing labor-saving machines.

Steam to thaw the ground

Some of the first machines brought to the Klondike gold fields ran on steam boilers, which could make electricity and drive hoists, water pumps and sawmills. After an accidental discovery and some trial and error, steam boilers revolutionized placer mining when they were adapted to thaw frozen ground. As the rush spilled across the border into Alaska, miners tried other machines in hope of striking it rich.

What the machines were for

Old machines are scattered across the preserve, each meant to overcome a particular mining problem.

A history with few written clues

Documenting this history is hard. Miners, as a rule, did not write about their daily work or describe their tools, and large machinery got little notice. Oral history recordings rarely describe mining, business records give the economics but rarely how the work was done, and newspapers tended to report how much gold was collected, not the machines that collected it. Historians turn to company catalogs and advertisements, patent drawings, trade journals and clues in historic photographs, and the machines themselves hint at how and when they were used.

What the rust says

The article says the machines tell of the challenges of placer mining in an unforgiving environment, the dramatic shift from steam power to the internal combustion engine, the trial and error that made poor ground profitable, the inventors and engineers who dreamed of conquering the Far North by machine, and the lives of the people who turned a gold rush into a gold industry and in the process changed the course of Alaska’s history. The author’s 2015 book, Gold, Steel & Ice: A History of Mining Machines in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, documents how machines made “gravel mining” possible in the heyday of gold production in the Far North. The article opens with a 1908 line by T. A. Rickard: gravel mining is a simple process, not the simplicity of a fool but that of empirical deduction, the growth of experience in overcoming natural obstacles.

Sources

• Chris Allan, National Park Service, Rust in the Wilderness: The Story of Mining Machines in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, Alaska Park Science, volume 16 (Science in Alaska’s Arctic Parks); rewritten in hubnx's own words.